WUXI, China -- One morning this summer, residents of this eastern city awoke to find that their beloved Tai Lake had turned rancid. The water was filled with a bloom of blue-green algae that gave off a rotten smell. It was not only undrinkable; it was untouchable. Few living things stirred in the water.
For almost three decades, the city had welcomed some of the world's biggest polluters. Churning out paper, photographic film, dye, fertilizer, cement and other products for the global marketplace, the businesses helped make Wuxi into one of China's wealthiest industrial cities.
They also poisoned the province's vast network of lakes, rivers and canals. In late May, when the toxic sludge reached Tai Lake, which is the main source of potable water for Wuxi's 5.8 million residents, people turned on their taps and got only sludge.
City officials decided they'd had enough. In a series of radical proclamations that sent shudders though the business community, Wuxi declared itself a newly reformed green city.
By September, the city had closed or given notice to close more than 1,340 polluting factories. Wuxi ordered the rest to clean up by June or be permanently shut down. The actions were applauded by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who has vowed to use economic incentives and punishments to aid in environmental protection and resource protection. Recently, China's State Council approved an environmental plan that includes reducing major pollutant discharges by 10 percent by 2010. Plagued by water shortages, choking on dusty air and alarmed by a sharp increase in pollution-related diseases and deaths, China has been searching for years for a way to fix its environment without hurting its economy. China has closed vast swaths of polluting factories in the past, only to reopen them when unemployment rose too high.
Cities take action
This year, some cities are taking measures that show that their officials are beginning to make the environment a higher priority than raising the gross domestic product, a fundamental shift in thinking for a country that can attribute much of its early development to being the place to which others outsourced their pollution.
In recent months, the State Environmental Protection Administration has armed local governments with a new set of tools for punishing polluters. Banks now have the right to deny loans to polluting companies. Officials are able now to force violators to issue humiliating public apologies in newspapers or television announcements detailing their crimes. And utility companies are empowered to raise electricity, gas or water rates for companies that consume too many resources.
The result has been devastating for a growing number of companies.
In Heilongjiang province in the northeast, officials this month announced that they had kicked out 100 polluting enterprises that were sending industrial runoff into a river that empties in Russia. In Shanxi province, the country's largest coal-mining area, officials have closed down most industry in a county whose outdated machinery polluted waterways. And in Inner Mongolia, the government closed a production facility for one of China's biggest companies, Mengniu Dairy, because it had been operating without wastewater processing facilities and discharging waste into the Yellow River.
In Wuxi, in the Yangtze River delta about 80 miles from Shanghai, city officials said it was too early to quantify the economic impact of the factory closings. But Li Yuanchao, the governor of Jiangsu province, where Wuxi is, has said, "We are paying back to nature -- even if our GDP decreases by 15 percent."
Liu Yamin, chief of Wuxi's Environmental Protection Bureau, acknowledged that as the city transforms itself from dependence on industry to a focus on high-tech research, there will be growing pains.
"The blue-green algae gave us a warning, a shock, but we Chinese have a saying that a bad thing can be turned into a good thing," Liu said. "So all Wuxi people feel they should turn the bad thing into a good thing and improve environmental protection."
Industrial transformation
Wuxi was one of the regions targeted under Deng Xiaoping's "opening up and reform" industrialization push in 1978. The area, once known as the "land of fish and rice," was transformed into the heart of China's chemical industry. Its economy ballooned from 2.5 billion yuan in 1978 to 330 billion yuan (about $44 billion) in 2006 -- bigger than that of Ecuador or Luxembourg.
Now China's sixth-largest industrial city, Wuxi produces chemicals sold to the United States and other countries. It has a downtown of closely packed, dusty high-rises and is surrounded by idyllic countryside dotted with gargantuan factories spewing black smoke. Half the population is employed by the 5,300 factories with annual sales of at least $650,000 each.
As Wuxi's economy grew, so did the pollution in Tai Lake, for centuries one of China's most picturesque lakes.
By 2003, it was clear the lake was sick, and the government banned fishing there. Zhou Xiaoming, 42, a third-generation fisherman, now rents boats on Tai Lake. Because of the pollution, "people like us fisherman have lost our profession," Zhou said.
Saving the lake
Wang Guoxiang, director of the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences at Nanjing Normal University in Jiangsu province, said government engineers tried every scientific alternative possible, spending more than $1.3 billion to try to save the lake.
But it took a crisis to force the government to start closing companies.
In late May, the algae in the lake grew so fast that taps all over the city spewed dirty water. While most algae are harmless, the chemical runoff from factories had fattened the algae in Tai Lake into a toxic muck poisonous to humans and aquatic life. According to residents interviewed later, consumers panicked, and the price of large bottles of water jumped from $1 a bottle to $6. People couldn't clean dishes, couldn't wash their clothes, couldn't shower.
Wuxi's environmental campaign has been held up as an example of how cities should deal with polluters. But the publicity has not had its desired affect. Instead of shunning the polluting companies in Wuxi, delegations from other parts of China have been coming to Wuxi to invite them to come to their cities.
"This is impossible to understand," said Wang of Nanjing Normal University. "We keep telling them they are just moving pollution around and it isn't good for them, good for China."
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: